Principles of Post-Mission Debriefing
by Ifwecansparkle
Summary: Jeff wakes up to find Abed in his hospital room after hours. They discuss his recent actions. Trigger warning for discussion of suicide.


**A bit of a response to the GI Jeff episode of Community. Then ending didn't quite ring true for me, and I wanted to discuss it further.**

**Trigger warnings for discussion of suicide and general hospital-ness.**

Jeff wasn't at all sure how much time passed while he was at the hospital, mostly because he slept a lot. Even after waking up from his weird death-throe hallucination, he spent most of his stay drifting in and out of sleep, occasionally waking to see members of the study group reading dozing in a chair beside him. Once when he awoke he found Abed staring at him, examining him in the way Abed examined things that he was on the verge of understanding. Jeff groaned and rubbed at his eyes.

"What time is it?" he questioned, attempting to reorient himself. Abed quirked something like a half smile.

"Five after eleven, when you asked," the look on his face indicated that he was making some sort of reference, but Jeff couldn't quite make out what it was. "PM," he added as an afterthought.

"What the hell are you doing here so late?" he questioned.

"Short answer? My cable's out," this answer was trite and it sounded false, and it was almost definitely a reference, and Jeff didn't really have the energy for it.

"What are you talking about?" he stretched a little and fumbled with the button on the bed rail until it allowed him to sit up.

"I'm going back to freshman year," Abed explained, continuing to stare him down. "We were all happier, then."

"We can't go back, Abed, that's not how it works."

"You can do whatever you want. You just have to know what that is."

"Stop it!" Abed cocked his head to the side, deep in thought before speaking again.

"Jeff, your journey into delusion made me realize something."

"Oh, I really can't wait to hear this one."

"None of those other timelines were the dark ones. This one is."

"Not this again, for the love of—and didn't I lose an arm in one of your timelines?" Abed was being weirder than usual, and Jeff was torn between exhausted irritation and genuine concern, because he really wasn't in a position to deal with one of Abed's all-too-frequent breaks with reality after barely having survived his own.

"Yeah," Abed admitted. "But we were all together. Well, minus Pierce, but we all know how that turned out."

"And Annie," Jeff reminded him.

"We went to visit her on the weekends," Abed responded matter-of-factly, as if it should have been obvious that even mirrorverse evil had standards.

"Is this about Troy?" Jeff questioned.

"No," Abed said, although it probably was, at least a little bit. "It's about you," Jeff responded to this with a heavy sigh.

"What about me?"

"What do you think?"

"Is this supposed to be some sort of 'I told you so' about Christmas or something because I'm not—" Abed shook his head.

"Why did you take the pills, Jeff?" Jeff blinked at Abed and floundered.

"I told you: they were some stupid youth pills, and I took them with—my point is, I wasn't thinking."

"That's not the Jeff Winger I know."

"Enlighten me, what would the Jeff Winger you know do?"

"Find a way to sue the makers of those pills for false advertising, probably, not take a handful with a fifth of scotch. If we were in a sitcom, the result of the pills would be to give you some kind of disgusting side effect like out-of-control hair growth, or unstoppable sweating, or really bad gas while on a date meant to prove your youth and virility. But you messed with the format, and took us in a direction more geared towards some kind of heavy-handed medical drama. Genre-jumping isn't something you do on accident, Jeff, and neither is this," Abed looked around the hospital room. "The Jeff Winger I know would consider the consequences, and he wouldn't like what would be waiting for him when he woke up."

"What are you trying to say?" Jeff said, and he sounded more nervous than he meant to. Abed studied him again, and there were probably people in the world who thought that Abed Nadir wasn't capable of expressing emotion, but Jeff Winger wasn't one of them anymore.

"I don't think you meant to wake up."

Jeff felt himself freeze up instantly. He glanced around the hospital room for an escape route, before realizing that he still had an IV in his arm, and that he probably wasn't going anywhere.

"You're always looking for a way out of dealing with consequences," Abed explained. "It's a staple of your Jerk-with-a-Heart-of-Gold persona. No way you would want to stick around for this. You wouldn't want to feel like Britta was psychoanalyzing you every time she looked at you, and you wouldn't want Shirley to give you a list of Bible verses that say the body is a temple—I read the New Testament in sophomore year—and you wouldn't want to put Annie through this, or see the look on her face when she recommended a support group," Abed's voice dropped into a low register as he added, "You wouldn't want to deal with being the one selfish enough to think you got to leave."

So that was what this was about. Jeff tried to compartmentalize Abed's accusations. And he latched onto the one that felt most tangible at the moment.

"I'm not leaving, Abed."

"Not anymore, but you're the one who seizes the opportunity. That's who you are, that's what you get to do, and you don't want to have to acknowledge that, or the fact that this is about more than turning forty. Jeff, do you know how many times this year I've thought—"

Abed clamped his mouth shut suddenly and averted his eyes to the floor. "Nevermind," he finished, with a nervous flutter of his hands. This time it was Jeff's turn to stare him down, dread building up from some source he didn't know he knew how to access.

"Abed…" he prompted gently, "What were you going to say?"

"Doesn't matter," Abed rejoined, shaking off his last comment. "The point is, Jeff—"

"Abed. Abed!"

"Yeah?" Abed was eyeing him nervously. Jeff smiled half-heartedly to silence his fears.

"Please don't do a special episode about this."

Abed caught the reference and continued in kind, "I don't know, Jeff. This is pretty alarming behavior. You know, there are specialists you could talk to," it was clear from his tone of voice that this was more of a pointed suggestion than an idle quote.

"Yeah," he almost chuckled in response, "Maybe I should do that. Maybe we both should."

"Not Duncan," Abed put in almost immediately.

"Not Duncan," Jeff agreed. Abed considered for a long time, looking around the hospital room as he did so. When he finally looked back at Jeff he was really smiling for the first time since the conversation had started. "

Okay," Abed said. It came easier than Jeff had expected, and he felt a certain degree of relief.

"Why don't you go get some rest. It's late, and Annie's probably worried."

Abed stood from the chair he had been perched on, and stretched hugely. "G'night, Jeff," he said, walking out of the room and shutting the door quietly behind him.

Jeff exhaled a breath he didn't realize he had been holding.

He didn't go back to sleep.


End file.
